Science Quote by Gregory Bateson

Stability, for Bateson, is never a thing you possess; it is a story you tell about a system you’ve stopped interrogating. The sentence is built like a trapdoor. It begins with the seemingly neutral promise of “pursu[ing] this matter further,” then predicts the familiar consolation prize: we will “be told” that the stable object either doesn’t change under stress or “resists the passage of time.” That passive construction matters. Bateson isn’t describing how the world works so much as how explanations harden into dogma, smuggled in by unnamed authorities and accepted because they feel tidy.

The intent is methodological: to expose a category error at the heart of everyday science talk. Calling something “stable” tempts us to treat it as an intrinsic property of an object, when Bateson’s cybernetic imagination insists stability is relational and conditional: a pattern maintained by feedback, constraints, and ongoing adjustment. “Impact or stress” and “external or internal variable” are the language of controlled experiments, but Bateson is quietly pointing out that control itself manufactures the appearance of invariance. Change the frame, broaden the timescale, or include the observer in the loop, and “unchanging” starts to look like “successfully compensated.”

The subtext carries his larger critique of linear, single-cause thinking. “Resists the passage of time” reads like a folk metaphysics of permanence, the kind of comforting claim people make when they want to stop tracing consequences. In mid-century systems theory, Bateson kept arguing that what endures is not substance but organization. The quote works because it shows stability as an alibi: a label that can end inquiry precisely where the interesting dynamics begin.